2014년 12월 28일 일요일

The English Constitution 4

The English Constitution 4

"Such is the position of the King in the heroic times of Greece--the
only person (if we except the herald, and priests, each both special
and subordinate) who is then presented to us as clothed with any
individual authority--the person by whom all the executive functions,
then few in number, which the society requires, are either performed or
directed. His personal ascendancy--derived from Divine countenance
bestowed both upon himself individually and upon his race, and probably
from accredited Divine descent--is the salient feature in the picture:
the people hearken to his voice, embrace his propositions, and obey his
orders: not merely resistance, but even criticism upon his acts, is
generally exhibited in an odious point of view, and is indeed never
heard of except from some one or more of the subordinate princes."

The characteristic of the English Monarchy is that it retains the
feelings by which the heroic kings governed their rude age, and has
added the feelings by which the Constitutions of later Greece ruled in
more refined ages. We are a more mixed people than the Athenians, or
probably than any political Greeks. We have progressed more unequally.
The slaves in ancient times were a separate order; not ruled by the
same laws, or thoughts, as other men. It was not necessary to think of
them in making a constitution: it was not necessary to improve them in
order to make a constitution possible. The Greek legislator had not to
combine in his polity men like the labourers of Somersetshire, and men
like Mr. Grote. He had not to deal with a community in which primitive
barbarism lay as a recognised basis to acquired civilisation. WE HAVE.
We have no slaves to keep down by special terrors and independent
legislation. But we have whole classes unable to comprehend the idea of
a constitution--unable to feel the least attachment to impersonal laws.
Most do indeed vaguely know that there are some other institutions
besides the Queen, and some rules by which she governs. But a vast
number like their minds to dwell more upon her than upon anything else,
and therefore she is inestimable. A republic has only difficult ideas
in government; a Constitutional Monarchy has an easy idea too; it has a
comprehensible element for the vacant many, as well as complex laws and
notions for the inquiring few.

A FAMILY on the throne is an interesting idea also. It brings down the
pride of sovereignty to the level of petty life. No feeling could seem
more childish than the enthusiasm of the English at the marriage of the
Prince of Wales. They treated as a great political event, what, looked
at as a matter of pure business, was very small indeed. But no feeling
could be more like common human nature as it is, and as it is likely to
be. The women--one half the human race at least--care fifty times more
for a marriage than a ministry. All but a few cynics like to see a
pretty novel touching for a moment the dry scenes of the grave world. A
princely marriage is the brilliant edition of a universal fact, and, as
such, it rivets mankind. We smile at the Court Circular; but remember
how many people read the Court Circular! Its use is not in what it
says, but in those to whom it speaks. They say that the Americans were
more pleased at the Queen's letter to Mrs. Lincoln, than at any act of
the English Government. It was a spontaneous act of intelligible
feeling in the midst of confused and tiresome business. Just so a royal
family sweetens politics by the seasonable addition of nice and pretty
events. It introduces irrelevant facts into the business of government,
but they are facts which speak to "men's bosoms" and employ their
thoughts.

To state the matter shortly, royalty is a government in which the
attention of the nation is concentrated on one person doing interesting
actions. A Republic is a government in which that attention is divided
between many, who are all doing uninteresting actions. Accordingly, so
long as the human heart is strong and the human reason weak, royalty
will be strong because it appeals to diffused feeling, and Republics
weak because they appeal to the understanding.

Secondly. The English Monarchy strengthens our Government with the
strength of religion. It is not easy to say why it should be so. Every
instructed theologian would say that it was the duty of a person born
under a Republic as much to obey that Republic as it is the duty of one
born under a Monarchy to obey the monarch. But the mass of the English
people do not think so; they agree with the oath of allegiance; they
say it is their duty to obey the "Queen," and they have but hazy
notions as to obeying laws without a queen. In former times, when our
Constitution was incomplete, this notion of local holiness in one part
was mischievous. All parts were struggling, and it was necessary each
should have its full growth. But superstition said one should grow
where it would, and no other part should grow without its leave. The
whole cavalier party said it was their duty to obey the king, whatever
the king did. There was to be "passive obedience" to him, and there was
no religious obedience due to any one else. He was the "Lord's
anointed," and no one else had been anointed at all. The Parliament,
the laws, the press were human institutions; but the Monarchy was a
Divine institution. An undue advantage was given to a part of the
Constitution, and therefore the progress of the whole was stayed.

After the Revolution this mischievous sentiment was much weaker. The
change of the line of sovereigns was at first conclusive, If there was
a mystic right in any one, that right was plainly in James II.; if it
was an English duty to obey any one whatever he did, he was the person
to be so obeyed; if there was an inherent inherited claim in any king,
it was in the Stuart king to whom the crown had come by descent, and
not in the Revolution king to whom it had come by vote of Parliament.
All through the reign of William III. there was (in common speech) one
king whom man had made, and another king whom God had made. The king
who ruled had no consecrated loyalty to build upon; although he ruled
in fact, according to sacred theory there was a king in France who
ought to rule. But it was very hard for the English people, with their
plain sense and slow imagination, to keep up a strong sentiment of
veneration for a foreign adventurer. He lived under the protection of a
French king; what he did was commonly stupid, and what he left undone
was very often wise. As soon as Queen Anne began to reign there was a
change of feeling; the old sacred sentiment began to cohere about her.
There were indeed difficulties which would have baffled most people;
but an Englishman whose heart is in a matter is not easily baffled.
Queen Anne had a brother living and a father living, and by every rule
of descent, their right was better than hers. But many people evaded
both claims. They said James II. had "run away," and so abdicated,
though he only ran away because he was in duresse and was frightened,
and though he claimed the allegiance of his subjects day by day. The
Pretender, it was said, was not legitimate, though the birth was proved
by evidence which any Court of Justice would have accepted. The English
people were "out of" a sacred monarch, and so they tried very hard to
make a new one. Events, however, were too strong for them. They were
ready and eager to take Queen Anne as the stock of a new dynasty; they
were ready to ignore the claims of her father and the claims of her
brother, but they could not ignore the fact that at the critical period
she had no children. She had once had thirteen, but they all died in
her lifetime, and it was necessary either to revert to the Stuarts or
to make a new king by Act of Parliament.

According to the Act of Settlement passed by the Whigs, the crown was
settled on the descendants of the "Princess Sophia" of Hanover, a
younger daughter of a daughter of James I. There were before her James
II., his son, the descendants of a daughter of Charles I., and elder
children of her own mother. But the Whigs passed these over because
they were Catholics, and selected the Princess Sophia, who, if she was
anything, was a Protestant. Certainly this selection was statesmanlike,
but it could not be very popular. It was quite impossible to say that
it was the duty of the English people to obey the House of Hanover upon
any principles which do not concede the right of the people to choose
their rulers, and which do not degrade monarchy from its solitary
pinnacle of majestic reverence, and make it one only among many
expedient institutions. If a king is a useful public functionary who
may be changed, and in whose place you may make another, you cannot
regard him with mystic awe and wonder; and if you are bound to worship
him, of course you cannot change him. Accordingly, during the whole
reigns of George I. and George II. the sentiment of religious loyalty
altogether ceased to support the Crown. The prerogative of the king had
no strong party to support it; the Tories, who naturally would support
it, disliked the actual king; and the Whigs, according to their creed,
disliked the king's office. Until the accession of George III. the most
vigorous opponents of the Crown were the country gentlemen, its natural
friends, and the representatives of quiet rural districts, where
loyalty is mostly to be found, if anywhere. But after the accession of
George III. the common feeling came back to the same point as in Queen
Anne's time. The English were ready to take the new young prince as the
beginning of a sacred line of sovereigns, just as they had been willing
to take an old lady, who was the second cousin of his
great-great-grandmother. So it is now. If you ask the immense majority
of the Queen's subjects by what right she rules, they would never tell
you that she rules by Parliamentary right, by virtue of 6 Anne, c. 7.
They will say she rules by "God's grace"; they believe that they have a
mystic obligation to obey her. When her family came to the Crown it was
a sort of treason to maintain the inalienable right of lineal
sovereignty, for it was equivalent to saying that the claim of another
family was better than hers: but now, in the strange course of human
events, that very sentiment has become her surest and best support.

But it would be a great mistake to believe that at the accession of
George III. the instinctive sentiment of hereditary loyalty at once
became as useful as now. It began to be powerful, but it hardly began
to be useful. There was so much harm done by it as well as so much
good, that it is quite capable of being argued whether on the whole it
was beneficial or hurtful. Throughout the greater part of his life
George III. was a kind of "consecrated obstruction". Whatever he did
had a sanctity different from what any one else did, and it perversely
happened that he was commonly wrong. He had as good intentions as any
one need have, and he attended to the business of his country, as a
clerk with his bread to get attends to the business of his office. But
his mind was small, his education limited, and he lived in a changing
time. Accordingly, he was always resisting what ought to be, and
prolonging what ought not to be. He was the sinister but sacred
assailant of half his ministries; and when the French Revolution
excited the horror of the world, and proved democracy to be "impious,"
the piety of England concentrated upon him, and gave him tenfold
strength. The Monarchy by its religious sanction now confirms all our
political order; in George III.'s time it confirmed little except
itself. It gives now a vast strength to the entire Constitution, by
enlisting on its behalf the credulous obedience of enormous masses;
then it lived aloof, absorbed all the holiness into itself, and turned
over all the rest of the polity to the coarse justification of bare
expediency.

A principal reason why the Monarchy so well consecrates our whole state
is to be sought in the peculiarity many Americans and many utilitarians
smile at. They laugh at this "extra," as the Yankee called it, at the
solitary transcendent element. They quote Napoleon's saying, "that he
did not wish to be fatted in idleness," when he refused to be grand
elector in Sieyes' Constitution, which was an office copied, and M.
Thiers says, well copied, from constitutional monarchy. But such
objections are wholly wrong. No doubt it was absurd enough in the Abbe
Sieyes to propose that a new institution, inheriting no reverence, and
made holy by no religion, should be created to fill the sort of post
occupied by a constitutional king in nations of monarchical history.
Such an institution, far from being so august as to spread reverence
around it, is too novel and artificial to get reverence for itself; if,
too, the absurdity could anyhow be augmented, it was so by offering an
office of inactive uselessness and pretended sanctity to Napoleon, the
most active man in France, with the greatest genius for business, only
not sacred, and exclusively fit for action. But the blunder of Sieyes
brings the excellence of real monarchy to the best light. When a
monarch can bless, it is best that he should not be touched. It should
be evident that he does no wrong. He should not be brought too closely
to real measurement. He should be aloof and solitary. As the functions
of English royalty are for the most part latent, it fulfils this
condition. It seems to order, but it never seems to struggle. It is
commonly hidden like a mystery, and sometimes paraded like a pageant,
but in neither case is it contentious. The nation is divided into
parties, but the crown is of no party. Its apparent separation from
business is that which removes it both from enmities and from
desecration, which preserves its mystery, which enables it to combine
the affection of conflicting parties--to be a visible symbol of unity
to those still so imperfectly educated as to need a symbol.

Thirdly. The Queen is the head of our society. If she did not exist the
Prime Minister would be the first person in the country. He and his
wife would have to receive foreign ministers, and occasionally foreign
princes, to give the first parties in the country; he and she would be
at the head of the pageant of life; they would represent England in the
eyes of foreign nations; they would represent the Government of England
in the eyes of the English.

It is very easy to imagine a world in which this change would not be a
great evil. In a country where people did not care for the outward show
of life, where the genius of the people was untheatrical, and they
exclusively regarded the substance of things, this matter would be
trifling. Whether Lord and Lady Derby received the foreign ministers,
or Lord and Lady Palmerston, would be a matter of indifference; whether
they gave the nicest parties would be important only to the persons at
those parties. A nation of unimpressible philosophers would not care at
all how the externals of life were managed. Who is the showman is not
material unless you care about the show.

But of all nations in the world the English are perhaps the least a
nation of pure philosophers. It would be a very serious matter to us to
change every four or five years the visible head of our world. We are
not now remarkable for the highest sort of ambition; but we are
remarkable for having a great deal of the lower sort of ambition and
envy. The House of Commons is thronged with people who get there merely
for "social purposes," as the phrase goes; that is, that they and their
families may go to parties else impossible. Members of Parliament are
envied by thousands merely for this frivolous glory, as a thinker calls
it. If the highest post in conspicuous life were thrown open to public
competition, this low sort of ambition and envy would be fearfully
increased. Politics would offer a prize too dazzling for mankind;
clever base people would strive for it, and stupid base people would
envy it. Even now a dangerous distinction is given by what is
exclusively called public life. The newspapers describe daily and
incessantly a certain conspicuous existence; they comment on its
characters, recount its details, investigate its motives, anticipate
its course. They give a precedent and a dignity to that world which
they do not give to any other. The literary world, the scientific
world, the philosophic world, not only are not comparable in dignity to
the political world, but in comparison are hardly worlds at all. The
newspaper makes no mention of them, and could not mention them. As are
the papers, so are the readers; they, by irresistible sequence and
association, believe that those people who constantly figure in the
papers are cleverer, abler, or at any rate, somehow higher, than other
people. "I wrote books," we heard of a man saying, "for twenty years,
and I was nobody; I got into Parliament, and before I had taken my seat
I had become somebody." English politicians are the men who fill the
thoughts of the English public: they are the actors on the scene, and
it is hard for the admiring spectators not to believe that the admired
actor is greater than themselves. In this present age and country it
would be very dangerous to give the slightest addition to a force
already perilously great. If the highest social rank was to be
scrambled for in the House of Commons, the number of social adventurers
there would be incalculably more numerous, and indefinitely more eager.

A very peculiar combination of causes has made this characteristic one
of the most prominent in English society. The middle ages left all
Europe with a social system headed by Courts. The Government was made
the head of all society, all intercourse, and all life; everything paid
allegiance to the sovereign, and everything ranged itself round the
sovereign--what was next to be greatest, and what was farthest least.
The idea that the head of the Government is the head of society is so
fixed in the ideas of mankind that only a few philosophers regard it as
historical and accidental, though when the matter is examined, that
conclusion is certain and even obvious.

In the first place, society as society does not naturally need a head
at all. Its constitution, if left to itself, is not monarchical, but
aristocratical. Society, in the sense we are now talking of, is the
union of people for amusement and conversation. The making of marriages
goes on in it, as it were, incidentally, but its common and main
concern is talking and pleasure. There is nothing in this which needs a
single supreme head; it is a pursuit in which a single person does not
of necessity dominate. By nature it creates an "upper ten thousand"; a
certain number of persons and families possessed of equal culture, and
equal faculties, and equal spirit, get to be on a level--and that level
a high level. By boldness, by cultivation, by "social science" they
raise themselves above others; they become the "first families," and
all the rest come to be below them. But they tend to be much about a
level among one another; no one is recognised by all or by many others
as superior to them all. This is society as it grew up in Greece or
Italy, as it grows up now in any American or colonial town. So far from
the notion of a "head of society" being a necessary notion, in many
ages it would scarcely have been an intelligible notion. You could not
have made Socrates understand it. He would have said, "If you tell me
that one of my fellows is chief magistrate, and that I am bound to obey
him, I understand you, and you speak well; or that another is a priest,
and that he ought to offer sacrifices to the gods which I or any one
not a priest ought not to offer, again I understand and agree with you.
But if you tell me that there is in some citizen a hidden charm by
which his words become better than my words, and his house better than
my house, I do not follow you, and should be pleased if you will
explain yourself."

And even if a head of society were a natural idea, it certainly would
not follow that the head of the civil Government should be that head.
Society as such has no more to do with civil polity than with
ecclesiastical. The organisation of men and women for the purpose of
amusement is not necessarily identical with their organisation for
political purposes, any more than with their organisation for religious
purposes; it has of itself no more to do with the State than it has
with the Church. The faculties which fit a man to be a great ruler are
not those of society; some great rulers have been unintelligible like
Cromwell, or brusque like Napoleon, or coarse and barbarous like Sir
Robert Walpole. The light nothings of the drawing-room and the grave
things of office are as different from one another as two human
occupations can be. There is no naturalness in uniting the two; the end
of it always is, that you put a man at the head of society who very
likely is remarkable for social defects, and is not eminent for social
merits.

The best possible commentary on these remarks is the history of English
history. It has not been sufficiently remarked that a change has taken
place in the structure of our society exactly analogous to the change
in our polity. A Republic has insinuated itself beneath the folds of a
Monarchy. Charles II. was really the head of society; Whitehall, in his
time, was the centre of the best talk, the best fashion, and the most
curious love affairs of the age. He did not contribute good morality to
society, but he set an example of infinite agreeableness. He
concentrated around him all the light part of the high world of London,
and London concentrated around it all the light part of the high world
of England. The Court was the focus where everything fascinating
gathered, and where everything exciting centred. Whitehall was an
unequalled club, with female society of a very clever and sharp sort
superadded. All this, as we know, is now altered. Buckingham Palace is
as unlike a club as any place is likely to be. The Court is a separate
part, which stands aloof from the rest of the London world, and which
has but slender relations with the more amusing part of it. The first
two Georges were men ignorant of English, and wholly unfit to guide and
lead English society. They both preferred one or two German ladies of
bad character to all else in London. George III. had no social vices,
but he had no social pleasures. He was a family man, and a man of
business, and sincerely preferred a leg of mutton and turnips after a
good day's work, to the best fashion and the most exciting talk. In
consequence, society in London, though still in form under the
domination of a Court, assumed in fact its natural and oligarchical
structure. It, too, has become an "upper ten thousand"; it is no more
monarchical in fact than the society of New York. Great ladies give the
tone to it with little reference to the particular Court world. The
peculiarly masculine world of the clubs and their neighbourhood has no
more to do in daily life with Buckingham Palace than with the
Tuileries. Formal ceremonies of presentation and attendance are
retained. The names of levee and drawing-room still sustain the memory
of the time when the king's bed-chamber and the queen's "withdrawing
room" were the centres of London life, but they no longer make a part
of social enjoyment: they are a sort of ritual in which nowadays almost
every decent person can if he likes take part. Even Court balls, where
pleasure is at least supposed to be possible, are lost in a London
July. Careful observers have long perceived this, but it was made
palpable to every one by the death of the Prince Consort. Since then
the Court has been always in a state of suspended animation, and for a
time it was quite annihilated. But everything went on as usual. A few
people who had no daughters and little money made it an excuse to give
fewer parties, and if very poor, stayed in the country, but upon the
whole the difference was not perceptible. The queen bee was taken away,
but the hive went on.

Refined and original observers have of late objected to English royalty
that it is not splendid enough. They have compared it with the French
Court, which is better in show, which comes to the surface everywhere
so that you cannot help seeing it, which is infinitely and beyond
question the most splendid thing in France. They have said, "that in
old times the English Court took too much of the nation's money, and
spent it ill; but now, when it could be trusted to spend well, it does
not take enough of the nation's money. There are arguments for not
having a Court, and there are arguments for having a splendid Court;
but there are no arguments for having a mean Court. It is better to
spend a million in dazzling when you wish to dazzle, than
three-quarters of a million in trying to dazzle and yet not dazzling."
There may be something in this theory; it may be that the Court of
England is not quite as gorgeous as we might wish to see it. But no
comparison must ever be made between it and the French Court. The
Emperor represents a different idea from the Queen. He is not the head
of the State; he IS the State. The theory of his Government is that
every one in France is equal, and that the Emperor embodies the
principle of equality. The greater you make him, the less, and
therefore the more equal, you make all others. He is magnified that
others may be dwarfed. The very contrary is the principle of English
royalty. As in politics it would lose its principal use if it came
forward into the public arena, so in society if it advertised itself it
would be pernicious. We have voluntary show enough already in London;
we do not wish to have it encouraged and intensified, but quieted and
mitigated. Our Court is but the head of an unequal, competing,
aristocratic society; its splendour would not keep others down, but
incite others to come on. It is of use so long as it keeps others out
of the first place, and is guarded and retired in that place. But it
would do evil if it added a new example to our many examples of showy
wealth--if it gave the sanction of its dignity to the race of
expenditure.

Fourthly. We have come to regard the Crown as the head of our morality.
The virtues of Queen Victoria and the virtues of George III. have sunk
deep into the popular heart. We have come to believe that it is natural
to have a virtuous sovereign, and that the domestic virtues are as
likely to be found on thrones as they are eminent when there. But a
little experience and less thought show that royalty cannot take credit
for domestic excellence. Neither George I., nor George II., nor William
IV. were patterns of family merit; George IV. was a model of family
demerit. The plain fact is, that to the disposition of all others most
likely to go wrong, to an excitable disposition, the place of a
constitutional king has greater temptations than almost any other, and
fewer suitable occupations than almost any other. All the world and all
the glory of it, whatever is most attractive, whatever is most
seductive, has always been offered to the Prince of Wales of the day,
and always will be. It is not rational to expect the best virtue where
temptation is applied in the most trying form at the frailest time of
human life. The occupations of a constitutional monarch are grave,
formal, important, but never exciting; they have nothing to stir eager
blood, awaken high imagination, work off wild thoughts. On men like
George III., with a predominant taste for business occupations, the
routine duties of constitutional royalty have doubtless a calm and
chastening effect. The insanity with which he struggled, and in many
cases struggled very successfully, during many years, would probably
have burst out much oftener but for the sedative effect of sedulous
employment. But how few princes have ever felt the anomalous impulse
for real work; how uncommon is that impulse anywhere; how little are
the circumstances of princes calculated to foster it; how little can it
be relied on as an ordinary breakwater to their habitual temptations!
Grave and careful men may have domestic virtues on a constitutional
throne, but even these fail sometimes, and to imagine that men of more
eager temperaments will commonly produce them, is to expect grapes from
thorns and figs from thistles.

Lastly, constitutional royalty has the function which I insisted on at
length in my last essay, and which, though it is by far the greatest, I
need not now enlarge upon again. It acts as a DISGUISE. It enables our
real rulers to change without heedless people knowing it. The masses of
Englishmen are not fit for an elective government; if they knew how
near they were to it, they would be surprised, and almost tremble.

Of a like nature is the value of constitutional royalty in times of
transition. The greatest of all helps to the substitution of a Cabinet
government for a preceding absolute monarchy is the accession of a king
favourable to such a government, and pledged to it. Cabinet government,
when new, is weak in time of trouble. The Prime Minister--the chief on
whom everything depends, who must take responsibility if any one is to
take it, who must use force if any one is to use it--is not fixed in
power. He holds his place, by the essence of the Government, with some
uncertainty. Among a people well-accustomed to such a Government, such
a functionary may be bold: he may rely, if not on the Parliament, on
the nation which understands and values him. But when that Government
has only recently been introduced, it is difficult for such a Minister
to be as bold as he ought to be. His power rests too much on human
reason, and too little on human instinct. The traditional strength of
the hereditary monarch is at these times of incalculable use. It would
have been impossible for England to get through the first years after
1688 but for the singular ability of William III. It would have been
impossible for Italy to have attained and kept her freedom without the
help of Victor Emmanuel: neither the work of Cavour nor the work of
Garibaldi were more necessary than his. But the failure of Louis
Philippe to use his reserve power as constitutional monarch is the most
instructive proof how great that reserve power is. In February, 1848,
Guizot was weak because his tenure of office was insecure. Louis
Philippe should have made that tenure certain. Parliamentary reform
might afterwards have been conceded to instructed opinion, but nothing
ought to have been conceded to the mob. The Parisian populace ought to
have been put down, as Guizot wished. If Louis Philippe had been a fit
king to introduce free government, he would have strengthened his
Ministers when they were the instruments of order, even if he
afterwards discarded them when order was safe, and policy could be
discussed. But he was one of the cautious men who are "noted" to fail
in old age: though of the largest experience and of great ability, he
failed and lost his crown for want of petty and momentary energy, which
at such a crisis a plain man would have at once put forth.

Such are the principal modes in which the institution of royalty by its
august aspect influences mankind, and in the English state of
civilisation they are invaluable. Of the actual business of the
sovereign--the real work the Queen does--I shall speak in my next paper.


II.

The House of Commons has inquired into most things, but has never had a
committee on "the Queen". There is no authentic blue-book to say what
she does. Such an investigation cannot take place; but if it could, it
would probably save her much vexatious routine, and many toilsome and
unnecessary hours.

The popular theory of the English Constitution involves two errors as
to the sovereign. First, in its oldest form at least, it considers him
as an "Estate of the Realm," a separate co-ordinate authority with the
House of Lords and the House of Commons. This and much else the
sovereign once was, but this he is no longer. That authority could only
be exercised by a monarch with a legislative veto. He should be able to
reject bills, if not as the House of Commons rejects them, at least as
the House of Peers rejects them. But the Queen has no such veto. She
must sign her own death-warrant if the two Houses unanimously send it
up to her. It is a fiction of the past to ascribe to her legislative
power. She has long ceased to have any. Secondly, the ancient theory
holds that the Queen is the executive. The American Constitution was
made upon a most careful argument, and most of that argument assumes
the king to be the administrator of the English Constitution, and an
unhereditary substitute for him--viz., a president--to be peremptorily
necessary. Living across the Atlantic, and misled by accepted
doctrines, the acute framers of the Federal Constitution, even after
the keenest attention, did not perceive the Prime Minister to be the
principal executive of the British Constitution, and the sovereign a
cog in the mechanism. There is, indeed, much excuse for the American
legislators in the history of that time. They took their idea of our
Constitution from the time when they encountered it. But in the
so-called Government of Lord North, George III. was the Government.
Lord North was not only his appointee, but his agent. The Minister
carried on a war which he disapproved and hated, because it was a war
which his sovereign approved and liked. Inevitably, therefore, the
American Convention believed the King, from whom they had suffered, to
be the real executive, and not the Minister, from whom they had not
suffered.

If we leave literary theory, and look to our actual old law, it is
wonderful how much the sovereign can do. A few years ago the Queen very
wisely attempted to make life peers, and the House of Lords very
unwisely, and contrary to its own best interests, refused to admit her
claim. They said her power had decayed into non-existence; she once had
it, they allowed, but it had ceased by long disuse. If any one will run
over the pages of Comyn's Digest or any other such book, title
"Prerogative," he will find the Queen has a hundred such powers which
waver between reality and desuetude, and which would cause a protracted
and very interesting legal argument if she tried to exercise them. Some
good lawyer ought to write a careful book to say which of these powers
are really usable, and which are obsolete. There is no authentic
explicit information as to what the Queen can do, any more than of what
she does.

In the bare superficial theory of free institutions this is undoubtedly
a defect. Every power in a popular Government ought to be known. The
whole notion of such a Government is that the political people--the
governing people--rules as it thinks fit. All the acts of every
administration are to be canvassed by it; it is to watch if such acts
seem good, and in some manner or other to interpose if they seem not
good. But it cannot judge if it is to be kept in ignorance; it cannot
interpose if it does not know. A secret prerogative is an
anomaly--perhaps the greatest of anomalies. That secrecy is, however,
essential to the utility of English royalty as it now is. Above all
things our royalty is to be reverenced, and if you begin to poke about
it you cannot reverence it. When there is a select committee on the
Queen, the charm of royalty will be gone. Its mystery is its life. We
must not let in daylight upon magic. We must not bring the Queen into
the combat of politics, or she will cease to be reverenced by all
combatants; she will become one combatant among many. The existence of
this secret power is, according to abstract theory, a defect in our
constitutional polity, but it is a defect incident to a civilisation
such as ours, where august and therefore unknown powers are needed, as
well as known and serviceable powers.

If we attempt to estimate the working of this inner power by the
evidence of those, whether dead or living, who have been brought in
contact with it, we shall find a singular difference. Both the
courtiers of George III. and the courtiers of Queen Victoria are agreed
as to the magnitude of the royal influence. It is with both an accepted
secret doctrine that the Crown does more than it seems. But there is a
wide discrepancy in opinion as to the quality of that action. Mr. Fox
did not scruple to describe the hidden influence of George III. as the
undetected agency of "an infernal spirit". The action of the Crown at
that period was the dread and terror of Liberal politicians. But now
the best Liberal politicians say, "WE shall never know, but when
history is written our children may know, what we owe to the Queen and
Prince Albert". The mystery of the Constitution, which used to be hated
by our calmest, most thoughtful, and instructed statesmen, is now loved
and reverenced by them.

Before we try to account for this change, there is one part of the
duties of the Queen which should be struck out of the discussion. I
mean the formal part. The Queen has to assent to and sign countless
formal documents, which contain no matter of policy, of which the
purport is insignificant, which any clerk could sign as well. One great
class of documents George III. used to read before he signed them, till
Lord Thurlow told him, "It was nonsense his looking at them, for he
could not understand them". But the worst case is that of commissions
in the army. Till an Act passed only three years since the Queen used
to sign ALL military commissions, and she still signs all fresh
commissions. The inevitable and natural consequence is that such
commissions were, and to some extent still are, in arrears by
thousands. Men have often been known to receive their commissions for
the first time years after they have left the service. If the Queen had
been an ordinary officer she would long since have complained, and long
since have been relieved of this slavish labour. A cynical statesman is
said to have defended it on the ground "that you MAY have a fool for a
sovereign, and then it would be desirable he should have plenty of
occupation in which he can do no harm". But it is in truth childish to
heap formal duties of business upon a person who has of necessity so
many formal duties of society. It is a remnant of the old days when
George III. would know everything, however trivial, and assent to
everything, however insignificant. These labours of routine may be
dismissed from the discussions. It is not by them that the sovereign
acquires his authority either for evil or for good.

The best mode of testing what we owe to the Queen is to make a vigorous
effort of the imagination, and see how we should get on without her.
Let us strip Cabinet government of all its accessories, let us reduce
it to its two necessary constituents--a representative assembly (a
House of Commons) and a Cabinet appointed by that assembly--and examine
how we should manage with them only. We are so little accustomed to
analyse the Constitution; we are so used to ascribe the whole effect of
the Constitution to the whole Constitution, that a great many people
will imagine it to be impossible that a nation should thrive or even
live with only these two simple elements. But it is upon that
possibility that the general imitability of the English Government
depends. A monarch that can be truly reverenced, a House of Peers that
can be really respected, are historical accidents nearly peculiar to
this one island, and entirely peculiar to Europe. A new country, if it
is to be capable of a Cabinet government, if it is not to degrade
itself to Presidential government, must create that Cabinet out of its
native resources--must not rely on these Old World debris.

Many modes might be suggested by which a Parliament might do in
appearance what our Parliament does in reality, viz., appoint a
Premier. But I prefer to select the simplest of all modes. We shall
then see the bare skeleton of this polity, perceive in what it differs
from the royal form, and be quite free from the imputation of having
selected an unduly charming and attractive substitute.

Let us suppose the House of Commons--existing alone and by itself--to
appoint the Premier quite simply, just as the shareholders of a railway
choose a director. At each vacancy, whether caused by death or
resignation, let any member or members have the right of nominating a
successor; after a proper interval, such as the time now commonly
occupied by a Ministerial crisis, ten days or a fortnight, let the
members present vote for the candidate they prefer; then let the
Speaker count the votes, and the candidate with the greatest number be
Premier. This mode of election would throw the whole choice into the
hands of party organisation, just as our present mode does, except in
so far as the Crown interferes with it; no outsider would ever be
appointed, because the immense number of votes which every great party
brings into the field would far outnumber every casual and petty
minority. The Premier should not be appointed for a fixed time, but
during good behaviour or the pleasure of Parliament. Mutatis mutandis,
subject to the differences now to be investigated, what goes on now
would go on then. The Premier then, as now, must resign upon a vote of
want of confidence, but the volition of Parliament would then be the
overt and single force in the selection of a successor, whereas it is
now the predominant though latent force.

It will help the discussion very much if we divide it into three parts.
The whole course of a representative Government has three
stages--first, when a Ministry is appointed; next, during its
continuance; last, when it ends. Let us consider what is the exact use
of the Queen at each of these stages, and how our present form of
government differs in each, whether for good or for evil from that
simpler form of Cabinet government which might exist without her.

At the beginning of an administration there would not be much
difference between the royal and unroyal species of Cabinet governments
when there were only two great parties in the State, and when the
greater of those parties was thoroughly agreed within itself who should
be its Parliamentary leader, and who therefore should be its Premier.
The sovereign must now accept that recognised leader; and if the choice
were directly made by the House of Commons, the House must also choose
him; its supreme section, acting compactly and harmoniously, would sway
its decisions without substantial resistance, and perhaps without even
apparent competition. A predominant party, rent by no intestine
demarcation, would be despotic. In such a case Cabinet government would
go on without friction whether there was a Queen or whether there was
no Queen. The best sovereign could then achieve no good, and the worst
effect no harm.

But the difficulties are far greater when the predominant party is not
agreed who should be its leader. In the royal form of Cabinet
government the sovereign then has sometimes a substantial selection; in
the unroyal, who would choose? There must be a meeting at "Willis's
Rooms"; there must be that sort of interior despotism of the majority
over the minority within the party, by which Lord John Russell in 1859
was made to resign his pretensions to the supreme government, and to be
content to serve as a subordinate to Lord Palmerston. The tacit
compression which a party anxious for office would exercise over
leaders who divided its strength, would be used and must be used.
Whether such a party would always choose precisely the best man may
well be doubted. In a party once divided it is very difficult to secure
unanimity in favour of the very person whom a disinterested bystander
would recommend. All manner of jealousies and enmities are immediately
awakened, and it is always difficult, often impossible, to get them to
sleep again. But though such a party might not select the very best
leader, they have the strongest motives to select a very good leader.
The maintenance of their rule depends on it Under a Presidential
Constitution the preliminary caucuses which choose the President need
not care as to the ultimate fitness of the man they choose. They are
solely concerned with his attractiveness as a candidate; they need not
regard his efficiency as a ruler. If they elect a man of weak judgment,
he will reign his stated term; even though he show the best judgment,
at the end of that term there will be by constitutional destiny another
election. But under a Ministerial government there is no such fixed
destiny. The Government is a removable Government, its tenure depends
upon its conduct. If a party in power were so foolish as to choose a
weak man for its head, it would cease to be in power. Its judgment is
its life. Suppose in 1859 that the Whig party had determined to set
aside both Earl Russell and Lord Palmerston and to choose for its head
an incapable nonentity, the Whig party would probably have been exiled
from office at the Schleswig-Holstein difficulty. The nation would have
deserted them, and Parliament would have deserted them, too; neither
would have endured to see a secret negotiation, on which depended the
portentous alternative of war or peace, in the hands of a person who
was thought to be weak--who had been promoted because of his
mediocrity--whom his own friends did not respect. A Ministerial
government, too, is carried on in the face of day. Its life is in
debate. A President may be a weak man; yet if he keep good Ministers to
the end of his administration, he may not be found out--it may still be
a dubious controversy whether he is wise or foolish. But a Prime
Minister must show what he is. He must meet the House of Commons in
debate; he must be able to guide that assembly in the management of its
business, to gain its ear in every emergency, to rule it in its hours
of excitement. He is conspicuously submitted to a searching test, and
if he fails he must resign.

Nor would any party like to trust to a weak man the great power which a
Cabinet government commits to its Premier. The Premier, though elected
by Parliament can dissolve Parliament. Members would be naturally
anxious that the power which might destroy their coveted dignity should
be lodged in fit hands. They dare not place in unfit hands a power
which, besides hurting the nation, might altogether ruin them. We may
be sure, therefore, that whenever the predominant party is divided, the
UN-royal form of Cabinet government would secure for us a fair and able
Parliamentary leader--that it would give us a good Premier, if not the
very best. Can it be said that the royal form does more?

In one case I think it may. If the constitutional monarch be a man of
singular discernment, of unprejudiced disposition, and great political
knowledge, he may pick out from the ranks of the divided party its very
best leader, even at a time when the party, if left to itself, would
not nominate him. If the sovereign be able to play the part of that
thoroughly intelligent but perfectly disinterested spectator who is so
prominent in the works of certain moralists, he may be able to choose
better for his subjects than they would choose for themselves. But if
the monarch be not so exempt from prejudice, and have not this nearly
miraculous discernment, it is not likely that he will be able to make a
wiser choice than the choice of the party itself. He certainly is not
under the same motive to choose wisely. His place is fixed whatever
happens, but the failure of an appointing party depends on the capacity
of their appointee.

There is great danger, too, that the judgment of the sovereign may be
prejudiced. For more than forty years the personal antipathies of
George III. materially impaired successive administrations. Almost at
the beginning of his career he discarded Lord Chatham: almost at the
end he would not permit Mr. Pitt to coalesce with Mr. Fox. He always
preferred mediocrity; he generally disliked high ability; he always
disliked great ideas. If constitutional monarchs be ordinary men of
restricted experience and common capacity (and we have no right to
suppose that BY MIRACLE they will be more), the judgment of the
sovereign will often be worse than the judgment of the party, and he
will be very subject to the chronic danger of preferring a respectful
common-place man, such as Addington, to an independent first-rate man,
such as Pitt.

We shall arrive at the same sort of mixed conclusion if we examine the
choice of a Premier under both systems in the critical case of Cabinet
government--the case of three parties. This is the case in which that
species of government is most sure to exhibit its defects, and least
likely to exhibit its merits. The defining characteristic of that
government is the choice of the executive ruler by the legislative
assembly; but when there are three parties a satisfactory choice is
impossible. A really good selection is a selection by a large majority
which trusts those it chooses, but when there are three parties there
is no such trust. The numerically weakest has the casting vote--it can
determine which candidate shall be chosen. But it does so under a
penalty. It forfeits the right of voting for its own candidate. It
settles which of other people's favourites shall be chosen, on
condition of abandoning its own favourite. A choice based on such
self-denial can never be a firm choice--it is a choice at any moment
liable to be revoked. The events of 1858, though not a perfect
illustration of what I mean, are a sufficient illustration. The Radical
party, acting apart from the moderate Liberal party, kept Lord Derby in
power. The ultra-movement party thought it expedient to combine with
the non-movement party. As one of them coarsely but clearly put it, "WE
get more of our way under these men than under the other men"; he meant
that, in his judgment, the Tories would be more obedient to the
Radicals than the Whigs. But it is obvious that a union of opposites so
marked could not be durable. The Radicals bought it by choosing the men
whose principles were most adverse to them; the Conservatives bought it
by agreeing to measures whose scope was most adverse to them. After a
short interval the Radicals returned to their natural alliance and
their natural discontent with the moderate Whigs. They used their
determining vote first for a Government of one opinion and then for a
Government of the contrary opinion.

I am not blaming this policy. I am using it merely as an illustration.
I say that if we imagine this sort of action greatly exaggerated and
greatly prolonged Parliamentary government becomes impossible. If there
are three parties, no two of which will steadily combine for mutual
action, but of which the weakest gives a rapidly oscillating preference
to the two others, the primary condition of a Cabinet polity is not
satisfied. We have not a Parliament fit to choose; we cannot rely on
the selection of a sufficiently permanent executive, because there is
no fixity in the thoughts and feelings of the choosers.

Under every species of Cabinet government, whether the royal or the
unroyal, this defect can be cured in one way only. The moderate people
of every party must combine to support the Government which, on the
whole, suits every party best. This is the mode in which Lord
Palmerston's administration has been lately maintained; a Ministry in
many ways defective, but more beneficially vigorous abroad, and more
beneficially active at home, than the vast majority of English
Ministries. The moderate Conservatives and the moderate Radicals have
maintained a steady Government by a sufficiently coherent union with
the moderate Whigs. Whether there is a king or no king, this
perservative self-denial is the main force on which we must rely for
the satisfactory continuance of a Parliamentary Government at this its
period of greatest trial. Will that moderation be aided or impaired by the addition of a sovereign? Will it be more effectual under the royal sort of Ministerial Government, or will it be less effectual?

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